Before the last 2,600 years of this thing called a “family”, there was 50,000 years of a thing called a “genos”, or “gens” in its various states of evolution. The term “family” has come to mean a man with his exclusive female partner and their children. This system of a man in sole possession of a woman is not a natural order. It evolved out of consideration for the idea of private land and property.
The main trigger for ownership of land is agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution, which occurred 11,000 years ago in the Middle East, took humans beyond subsistence and into the realm of surplus. Suddenly we see the idea that the land that you have tilled for decades can be claimed as your own. But even then it took another 5000 years for the events to progress via the separate inventions of the wheel, then the metal tool, then writing before the first City State of Sumer arose in the eastern hemisphere in 6,000BC. And then further millennia before the idea progressed outward into the consolidation of power that we start to recognise as Nation States.
And so, beyond the possibility of creating surplus just for your wider family or community, there arrives ambition, or greed depending on your point of view, or maybe more accurately depending on the extent of it. The urge to expand beyond what is necessary, beyond the immediate needs and even desires of your community is the birth of Empire and the Imperialist.
It would be interesting to gaze into the circumstances of such a person and the alteration of mind that causes a perceived need to expand, to acquire, to dominate. We should investigate the roots of greed. I believe that this unhealthy and certainly unsustainable behaviour should be medicalised by psychologists as a disorder. It is certainly an unhealthy outcome for anyone standing in its path.
This expansion then requires the division of labour to create even greater surplus. With the division of labour, there then follows the creation of class to decide who does which “job” on that landowner’s property, and of course without any share of the surplus, just a wage. Only the landowner owns the wealth created by this system. And the growth of power and numbers in this new system allows our landowner to claim territory from others who perceived no need to expand without good reason. If only they could have seen what was coming. We have the luxury of hindsight.
And so for the first time, inheritance then gains significance – the need for the landowner to identify his true heir to inherit the spoils of expansion and conquest. The man, being the owner of the property could only know who his real heirs were if his woman did not have other partners. And so man made woman prisoner, confining her to the home with the chastity belt under threat of death for infidelity. Women’s rights have been slowly fighting back from this massive oppression since this time. And children’s rights to shape their own future have yet even further to go.
This moment in history is the origin of private property and the family, along with the Nation State as described by Engels. It is where the concept of “famulus” arrived.
A “famulus” is the Latin for a domestic slave, and the plural “familia” was the group of domestic slaves that did not originally include wife and children. This later came to include the wife and children which as Engels evidences, could be bequeathed to someone else in a Will.
The woman and children had no more rights than the servants and were not recognised separately. The original “nuclear family” is the first Imperial home – the moment in history at which, all of a sudden, everybody is not equal. Imperialism, like socialism, begins at home.
The opposite of socialism is generally taken to be conservatism, but what conservatism is looking to conserve is imperialism. And as has always been the case, society and the civic order describe the two orders that sit uncomfortably together. The distinction between these polar opposites was first named by the Romans as the newer system arose – Civitas, and before it, Societas. Society.
Society is not just a concept – a vague idea of something that exists within our current system. It is not another way of referring to our true system Civitas. Make no mistake. We live in Civitas, a Civic Order. It is not the same as Societas.
Societas, Society, is a separate, distinct and entirely different form of organisation. Society was the system. It massively predates our current system. And it has been entirely replaced. Now we have the imperial home – the man and the famulus.
Welcome to inequality. Wealth starts to accumulate with individual men with their own families. These men need other men to work for them, not with them, creating classes. Now comes the need to legitimise and protect the division. The State is the apparatus to achieve this. Policemen, courts and prisons, where before there were none.
So, to quote Engels, “The true people in arms, organised in its self defence in gentes, phratries and tribes, was replaced by an armed ‘public force’ in the service of these state authorities and therefore at their command for use also against the people”
The land is now owned by the state and the mortgage is invented. There is now no longer an inherent right to land. The rent is now five sixths of what the land produces and failure to pay leaves the debtor to sell his children into slavery, or himself. Thus as Engels puts it, “the pleasant dawn of civilization began for the Athenian people”.
There are those from that day right through to this, who fight to restore justice, to put the wealth back in common. But there are many who will take the dollar from the rich man to entrench the injustice and “just do their job”. They deny that we have a right to land and instead sell us a mortgage. And we became accustomed to thinking that, in the absence of any visible alternative, that all this is OK.
Same as it ever was? No, because prior to the State, wealth was shared by the gens and the tribe. The injustice of inequality had not yet come into being. Inequality has not always existed. It has been growing where in 2019 we arrived at the point where there are 2,500 billionaires in the world and 20,000 people worth more than 400 million dollars. It didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t start at the beginning of human history.
Women, children, old people, and even men sick of playing the Imperialist in their own home, may be interested in how people lived and organised themselves before families. How did people actually live together for upwards of 50,000 years? Before our current system that has raised inequality to insanity.
The answer, all over the world, was and still remains the Gens.
Gens is the Latin word for it. The plural is Gentes. Genos is the Greek. It is the origin of our words generation, generate and gene.
In Sanskrit, the word is Gana. Gan is the German, which means to produce, to generate, to beget. The “G” is regularly replaced by a “K” in its derivatives, giving us Kan, from which we derive Kyn in Norse and Anglo-Saxon and Kin in English.
As with the Iroquois and the Greeks so with the Romans, Germans and Celts, all organised as Gentes whether that be descent in the female or the male line.
Linguistics and Anthropology point to a universal development pattern through the seven basic inventions that paved the way to civilisation. And in this universal pattern of development as demonstrated by Lewis Morgan in his “Systems of Consanguinity”, there is first Subsistence (survival), then Government, then Language, then “Family” (gentilic not “famulus”), then Religion, then House Life and Architecture. All the way up to this point, private land and property have not yet been invented. It will be way upwards of 20,000 years before it is. This part of history is the part buried by imperialists. It is the missing part that comes before the “classical civilisation” of the embryonic States of Athens and Rome but way after the bear-skinned savage hordes of popular pre-historical fiction. It is Barbarism, the time of Barbarians.
This hidden history is where people were sophisticated beyond savagery. They were essentially conservative – when you have what you need, are surrounded by people you love and have time for art then where is the need for change? When we discover ancient tribes, we find them in this conservative state. It ain’t broke so they didn’t fix it.
There was no need to make prisoners of women to identify heirs, no land to fight over since it belonged to everyone, and there was no need to rewrite the past – why would you need to re-invent the past if there is nothing in it to be ashamed of?
It is less than three millennia since private ownership of land created empire that created class that created power that created greed and corruption. This is empire. We await in dread the arrival of the world’s first trillionaire, and with him the arrival of another billion dispossessed, another national famine, and countless environmental cataclysms as the train careers from the track and plunges over the side of the mountain. We are all passengers.
The insanity of empire manifests as paranoia of any reduction in wealth; in extreme avarice and in fear of those who have been dispossessed. And so dispossession must be practically absolute. We may be allowed to own land but not power. Our vote is rendered meaningless by rigged systems, We fought for the right to vote, and then they took its power away offering us a two-party system where an end to the Class System, hierarchies and vast private Estates is nowhere to be seen. We tire of voting.
Imperialism’s paranoid fear is that, given an inch, we will take a mile. The truth is that we will take what is ours. The truth is that this is much, much more than a mile. Their paranoia and fear are well founded. 2,600 years may seem a long time, but in geological time and even on the timescale of human development, it is a mere blip. And in that blip, the foul idea of the Military Nation State has polluted the planet and brought us to the verge of catastrophe. Not very sustainable this system. We need another. We had another. It still exists amongst us. It has its rules buried in the Common Law. We may yet decide to have our old world back again, or a modern variation based on its principles as an organic starting point. If we do, this is how it worked.